1975 A sideways gearbox, nine pole positions and Ferrari’s first title in 11 years

A gearbox across the car

The new Ferrari carried its gearbox sideways. Late in 1974 Mauro Forghieri told Lauda what he planned for the coming season: a five-speed gearbox set crosswise ahead of the rear wheels, which brought the weight closer to the middle of the car. The T of the Ferrari 312T stood for trasversale, transverse. Lauda remembered the March 721X of 1972, another car built round a clever gearbox, and by his own account he was very sceptical; Forghieri talked him round.

The season began in the old car. In the Ferrari 312B3, with a new chassis built for him, he took 4th on the grid at Buenos Aires on 12 January in the dying seconds of practice, and finished 6th; a fortnight later at Interlagos he was 5th. The cars handled badly in both races. Ferrari held the 312T back until the third round, at Kyalami in South Africa on 1 March.

Its first weekend went wrong. In practice Lauda ran over oil from Emerson Fittipaldi’s exploding engine at Sunset Corner and went through the catch-fences, tearing the outer skin of the monocoque. In the race he followed his team-⁠mate Clay Regazzoni for much of the distance and finished 5th; Denis Jenkinson of Motor Sport thought he had stayed behind because he did not trust Regazzoni, and noticed that the pit was annoyed. The Italian press was critical. Thirty years later Lauda said the engine had been about 80 bhp down, from a slipping belt to the fuel-metering unit; the contemporary report blamed his caution instead. He said, too, that he restored the team’s spirits at Ferrari’s own test track, Fiorano, where the 312T, run back to back with the old car, broke the lap record. In 2005 he called the car a gem and gave the credit to Forghieri, as the machines chapter tells.

On 13 April it won for the first time, in the non-⁠championship BRDC International Trophy at Silverstone. James Hunt’s Hesketh was leading when its engine blew, and Lauda beat Fittipaldi by a tenth of a second. He later admitted that he had switched off the rev limiter and taken the flat-12 to 12,800 rpm, and was criticised in Italy for saying so.

A fortnight later, in the Spanish Grand Prix at Montjuïc in Barcelona, he started from pole and did not complete a lap. At the first hairpin Vittorio Brambilla hit Mario Andretti’s Parnelli, which was pushed into Lauda’s Ferrari, and the Ferrari struck Regazzoni’s; its front suspension was broken. Later in the race Rolf Stommelen’s car left the track and spectators were killed. The race was stopped after 29 of its 75 laps.

Monaco, Zolder, Anderstorp

At Monaco he was fastest early in practice, then crashed his own car into the guard rails where Regazzoni had crashed earlier, and went on in Regazzoni’s bent car. At the very end of the last session he took pole in 1:26.40, and remembered the effort three decades later: “I’d pulled so much out of the bag to beat Tom Pryce’s Shadow to pole that I was trembling when I got out of the car”.

The race on 11 May started in the rain. He led, came in for slicks after 24 laps, took the lead back when Ronnie Peterson made his own stop, and eased off as the two-hour limit drew near. The flag fell after 75 of the 78 laps, with Fittipaldi 2.8 seconds behind. No Ferrari had won at Monaco since Maurice Trintignant in 1955.

A fortnight later at Zolder he started from pole on the left of the grid, the side he had chosen for the first corner, and Carlos Pace beat him to it all the same. On lap 2 he let the charging Brambilla past, aware that the race had barely begun, retook the lead on lap 6 and drew away to win by 19.2 seconds. Jenkinson saw a different driver from the year before: “The fast but rather uncertain Niki Lauda of 1974 has matured and no longer looks about to make a mistake and uses the Ferrari to the full.”

At Anderstorp on 8 June he started only 5th, after 134 laps of practice; Ferrari changed the gearboxes before every race. For most of the Swedish Grand Prix he ran 10 seconds behind Carlos Reutemann’s Brabham. Late in the race the Brabham’s tyres went off, while the Ferrari ran on a different Goodyear that Lauda had insisted on, and on lap 70 he went by. He set the fastest lap and won by 6.3 seconds, his third win in a row. Jenkinson thought Reutemann had lost the race more than Lauda had won it, and allowed that Lauda had worked very hard for it.

Hunt’s day at Zandvoort

The Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort on 22 June began on a wet track, and from pole Lauda led, driving off the racing line to keep his rain tyres cool. Hunt gambled on slicks first; Lauda came in for his a lap later, on lap 13, and rejoined behind Hunt’s Hesketh and Jean-⁠Pierre Jarier’s Shadow. It took him until lap 43 to pass the Shadow. Then he hunted the Hesketh down, set the fastest lap, and found that Hunt used the back-markers to keep him behind. He finished 1.06 seconds short. It was Hunt’s first Grand Prix win, and the Hesketh team’s.

In 2005 Lauda said that Hunt had driven beautifully that day, and that with his car set up for the wet on a drying track he had not wanted to risk his challenge for the championship. A fortnight later at Paul Ricard he took pole with two quick laps at the end of practice, led the French Grand Prix from start to finish with Hunt behind him, and won by 1.59 seconds. It was his fourth win of the year, from nine races.

That summer Der Spiegel profiled him. It found him building a house on the Fuschlsee, near Salzburg, and gave the motto he had set himself for the Grands Prix, the line that opens this page. It quoted his countryman Helmut Zwickl, the Austrian motor-racing journalist, on how he worked: no engineer, Zwickl said, but a man who drew logical conclusions and balanced a chassis on instinct. Lauda described racing as unbroken work, and said he sat at his car so as always to know what it was doing.

Four and a half points in three races

The next three races brought him 4.5 points. In the British Grand Prix at Silverstone on 19 July a storm broke over the circuit, and he changed early to rain tyres. At that stop a wheel was not properly secured and came off in the pit lane, which cost him a second stop to have it tightened. The race was stopped after 56 of its 67 laps and he was classified 8th, 2 laps down. Jenkinson named only two drivers who had been consistently tidy at Silverstone, Fittipaldi and Lauda, and added that even they could not be guaranteed perfect on every lap.

At the Nürburgring Nordschleife he took pole in 6:58.6, the first lap under 7 minutes in official practice for the German Grand Prix; his pole of 1974 had been 7:00.8. He led for 9 laps of the 14 until a puncture cost him the lead, and finished 3rd. At home, at the Österreichring on 17 August, he took pole again. In the warm-up that morning Mark Donohue crashed; he died of his injuries, and a marshal was also fatally injured. The race was run in the rain. Lauda, his car set up for a dry track, led until lap 14, slipped back, and lost 5th place to Peterson on the last lap. The race was stopped after 29 of its 54 laps, so only half points were paid, and his 6th place earned him 0.5: the only half point of his career.

That left him with 51.5 points before Monza, to Reutemann’s 34 and Fittipaldi’s 33. Under the rules of 1975 a driver counted his best six results from the first seven races and his best six from the last seven, so Reutemann, by winning both the races that remained, could reach 52. The Canadian Grand Prix, due on 21 September, had been cancelled. Lauda needed half a point more: any finish in the first six at Monza would do.

Monza, 7 September

He dominated practice for the Italian Grand Prix at Monza and took pole, with Regazzoni beside him. Der Spiegel reported that on race morning Luca di Montezemolo, the team manager, had persuaded the village priest at Arcore not to ring the bell for five o’clock Mass, so that Lauda could sleep on undisturbed in his hotel nearby. Before the start Fittipaldi drove him round the damp circuit in a Lamborghini Countach to look at the track; Jenkinson suspected that the two of them were discussing tactics. On the way to the grid Lauda weaved from lock to lock to warm his tyres, a habit of Jackie Stewart’s that Jenkinson had thought extinct.

Regazzoni made the better start, led every lap and won. Lauda ran 2nd until the start of lap 46, when Fittipaldi passed him under braking for the chicane. Lauda later said he had a problem with a rear damper; the race report in Motor Sport said he had no need to fight back, since all he wanted was a championship point. He finished 3rd, 23.2 seconds behind his team-⁠mate, and was World Champion with a race to spare, at 26.

No Ferrari driver had been champion since John Surtees in 1964, and the team took the constructors’ championship too, with 72.5 points to Brabham’s 54. Jenkinson wondered aloud whether Lauda had been kind to the beaten champion at the chicane.

Lauda himself found little to celebrate in the moment. In 2005 he told Alan Henry: “It was strange. Almost an anticlimax. There was a mixture of satisfaction and sense of achievement. But so much had happened during the previous four years that it seemed much longer since I’d originally started in F1.” In 2017 he looked back on the two seasons together: “I screwed up in 1974, though. I had a couple of spins and incidents, so wasn’t quite ready to challenge for the championship, but in 1975 I was quick and the car was perfect, so my first world title actually felt relatively easy.”

Watkins Glen, 5 October

With both titles settled, Motor Sport asked whether Lauda could still win a race he did not need. At Watkins Glen he was fastest in all four practice sessions, led the United States Grand Prix from start to finish, and won by 4.9 seconds from Fittipaldi. Regazzoni held Fittipaldi up so openly that the clerk of the course showed him the black flag, and Montezemolo went to argue with the officials; Motor Sport thought the help unnecessary. Alan Henry, its reporter, gave the champion his due:

The year ended with 14 starts, five wins, nine pole positions and 64.5 points, every one of them counted, against Fittipaldi’s 45, Reutemann’s 37, Hunt’s 33 and Regazzoni’s 25. The pole positions matched his nine of 1974; the wins were three more. By the end of the year Forghieri was already reworking the car into the 312T2, the car he would race from the fourth round of 1976, as champion, with the No. 1 on its nose.